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Naturally we have no idea how to find the guesthouse we have booked in Ubud, but this too has been our way in Bali, and so far, other than the fact we are from time to time truly lost, each wrong turn has brought us more pleasure and delight than the last. That Joy and I travel so well together is a gift and I cannot imagine any other person who I could be so lost with, so disoriented and even truly stuck with on a occasions, who I would feel more comfortable and less anxious with than Joy. Besides, Joy is immensely strong, reasonably prudent, mostly fully aware, AND she does eighty percent of the navigating and all of the driving.
Once we’ve arrived in Penestanan and gotten a general sense of where our guesthouse is we leave the car, grab all of our luggage, computers, electrical equipment, and Joy’s travel guitar, and head a kilometer up and down narrow paths that no car can traverse to the guesthouse.
It’s truly a jungle here, no longer in the breezy mountains, one degree of latitude off the equator, sweat pouring off us, rain falling sporadically but hard, the vegetation teeming, hanging, crawling, covering, rising up united in its patent desire to conquer every square inch of ground, air, sunlight, soil, and dead branch that will support it. Plants grow in the moist air itself, floating like feathers, twisted and twirling, embracing space with arms spread wide, wrapped in love as it were, with life, and with the desire to manifest themselves.
The guesthouse, however, is drab, stale, darkly moist, and covered with green lichen. The stones in the flooring are loose beneath our feet. The lights are not working. The housekeeper cannot find our reservation. There are no empty rooms. The owner’s wife appears. We are served coffee. Karja himself is found and arrives to deal with the situation. He keeps guesthouse reservation records in his computer. His lovely wife – who is not computer savvy – keeps parallel records in a wet and wrinkled guestbook. Karja has been living in town, away from his wife and the guesthouse, because it has been more comfortable that way given the emotional difficulties their twenty one year old son has been having, something Karja and his wife are very open with us about, some form of bipolar disorder, some rage filled possession by demons and ancient priests commanding the son in ways that frighten and confuse him. The family has consulted the local shaman and healer, who has advised that the son quit graduate school and let the past inhabit him, to go with the flow as it were, unafraid. The boy has moved out, taken his father’s car, apparently gone to Denpasar. His parents are hopeful and concerned. Who wouldn’t be?
But back to the matter of our accommodations. The wife has rented out our room. There are no rooms otherwise available here. It has grown dark. The mosquitoes are out. Karja has a brother. The brother also runs a guesthouse. It is behind the supermarket in town. We can stay there. Karja’s one-eyed father will go with us, show us where the guesthouse is. Everything has been taken care of. So we again load up all of our luggage, computers, electrical equipment, and Joy’s travel guitar, and head a kilometer up and down narrow paths to the car. Karja’s father sits in the back seat and points left and right. We get to the supermarket. The father finds the brother who leads us down a set of narrow steps, up a set of narrow steps, down a dark shoulder wide path between concrete walls, up steps, down steps, using our camera flashlight apps to help guide us, we walk and walk, over tiny bridges and flat stones, ultimately arriving in a compound bordered by wet and swampy rice paddies and a free standing two story home with a living room, fully equipped kitchen, stove, refrigerator, downstairs bedroom, upstairs bedroom, working fans, mosquito netting, hot and cold running water, and a veranda. It is silent but for the chirping of frogs and other creatures of the night, the moon emerges from the clouds before the rains begin again. We are in the most private and beautiful of settings that we could ever imagine, paradise in Penestanan. The guides have spoken.
In the morning we walk into Ubud, which takes about thirty minutes. There is no place on earth like it, Provincetown on steroids with temples in a sauna, Polo shops, upscale restaurants, health food stores, aged hippies, the last of the beat generation, long hairs, scantily clad western men and women, tourists from every corner of the globe, gift shops, art shops, junk shops, massage parlors, gelato shops, yoga studios, crowds, traffic, coffee shops, my god even a Starbucks, and all somehow with a Balinese flair. Not somewhere we want to hang out in for long, although the restaurants are actually good, we see two separate Balinese dance troupes, one of which Joy dance’s with, I have the video to prove it, the Blanco Museum, the monkey temple. Entertainment. But the real surprise and real pleasure of Ubud for us is in the outlying neighborhoods, of car-free lanes, small outdoor indigenous restaurants, quaint guesthouses, immense quiet, beautiful vegetation and stone work, running irrigation ditches, and, of course, our little palace, which we stock with beer, wine, cheese and crackers and where I can comfortably write and do yoga under the mosquito netting and Joy can play her guitar.